It's mono, yo!

Hi IH,

I make music with hardware samplers. Gear like the Erica Synths Sample Drum, Elektron Digitakt and Roland SP-404 wants mono files, so prepping samples means converting stereo to mono constantly. The annoying part is that a lot of tools (and even some DAW exports) do it badly by just keeping the left channel, which quietly throws away half the sound.

So I built It's mono, yo!, a small native macOS app that does it properly. A real summed downmix, batch conversion, configurable bit depth and sample rate, and you can drop in a whole sample pack and keep the folder structure intact. No accounts, no subscriptions, works offline.

A few honest details:

• It is $0.99 on the Mac App Store, one-time.

• It is open source (MIT), because conversion logic is the kind of thing that should be inspectable.

• Since launching in March it has done about 60 sales. Small, but it is a niche tool doing one job well, and I am fine with that. No marketing spend or anything.

What I have spent most time on lately is not code, it is distribution: a small SEO site with device-specific guides (all now indexed), and reaching out to synth blogs and the gear community. That has been the harder, slower part.

It is a side project, not a startup. The goal was to do one annoying task really well and learn the indie loop end to end.

Question for the room: for a cheap, niche utility like this, where has distribution actually paid off for you? Content/SEO, press, communities, ASO? Curious what has worked for the small-tool folks here.

Website: https://itsmonoyo.iamjarl.com

Source: https://github.com/JarlLyng/It-s-mono-yo-